What are Cultural Victory Strategies?

[Mountain Sage]

Originally posted by nbarclay


(No, 100K civ-wide cultural victory is not a path for wimps or peaceniks.)

Really? Now I understand why I never managed it, even having all the cultural improvements in all my cities...

[Cort Haus]

I've been practising OCC 20k culture wins on tiny pangeas - 4 civs. The problem there is that one rival can quickly win by domination by knocking out the other two, so you have to get the culture win fast.

This requires high culture as early as possible - and the best wonders are Great Lib, Hanging Gardens, Sistine & Shakespeare. Colossus is available cheap and early, (and is essential in OCC) but is sometimes best used as a prebuild for the GL.

Also very helpul are an early temple and library, especially the library.

If you get them early enough, the temple, library and great library can account for around a quarter of the 20k you need by the time you get it.

This means that Literature is the tech to get, suggesting that commercial civs like the Greeks are better placed for this than the Babs, unless the Babs can trade for alphabet very early on. The Greeks also get quick-build libraries so are good for culture wins.

[ToeTruck]

In my experience, the 20k culture city is easier to accomplish than the 100k civ-wide culture:

Reason 1) The 100k culture victory requires you to have twice the culture of the nearest opponent. As mentioned earlier in this thread, that requires a significant amount of war-mongering either to prevent a rival from reaching that size or to kill him off once he does.

Reason 1a) A corollary to Reason 1 - The culture improvements are exactly what a warmonger doesn't build. Well, Temples, maybe, but probably not Temples, Colosseums, Cathedrals, Libraries, and Universities in all your cities. 100k culture with 50 cities means 2000 culture per city. Corruption makes that difficult.

Reason 2) A big city with culture improvements and wonders tends to support itself very well. You can put a Temple, Colloseum, and Cathedral in a size 12 city and spend nothing on entertainment. The key is to grow to 12 (and then 20) as quickly as you can and use other cities to benefit the big city.

I love to play OCC games , but I've also experimented with other low city count configurations like one "Mother Ship" and three or four supporting cities.

Ideally, the first city would build a single warrior and spawn a settler then never build another worker or settler unless it is bumping into the pop 12 barrier with nothing to build. The second city would alternate building warriors/spearmen and settlers/workers until a small cluster of cities is created.

Or, reverse the roles; make the first city the worker/settler farm and the second city the big city. The drawback of that approach is that corruption comes into play and the culture from you Palace doesn't count towards the 20k.

Also, in some ways, OCC is easier than two or three cities. What? Yep, it's true. First, the AI is much more tolerant of a single city civ than a three or four city civ. At that size, you're enough of a threat/temptation that you will probably be attacked.

Secondly, the turns used to build the first settler (and regrow the lost pop) represent a significant loss in culture. Many people think: "Yea, I could have built a Temple instead of a Settler, but so what? All I lost was 12 turns of Temple Culture." Wrong! The culture lost by those turns comes from the *other* end of the culture stream. Those 12 turns really represent 12 turns at 70 - 90 culture. That's almost 5% of the total 20k.

Yes, keeping up in research with just one city is hard, but only gets really hard at Emperor and Deity. In fact, an OCC cultural victory at Monarch and below should be pretty straightforward. I think.

All this thinking has me wanting to try...

- TT

[steamthunk]

Greetings Culture Lovers!

Thanks to some of the tips in this thread and some good luck I managed to secure my first culture victory. It was the 20K type since people said just build everything in one city. Here is the breakdown of my game:

Regent. Babylonians. Standard size map. Tiny archipelogos with 8 civs. I tried to not make things impossible for myself on the first to test the strategy. I figured Religious/Scientific would be killer for fast improvements.

I started on the second biggest island on the map (not that big under tiny arch), but found that the french and the chinese were also very close by. In no time it became apparent that I'd only have room to found 2 cities on the island. Babylon started on fairly good grasslands and hills, but there were a lot of mountains and both my cities would be slow in initial growth compared to Beijing which was on a river.

I decided only an early bowmen rush would give me a good chance to keep Babylon on building improvements/wonders and not be harrassed throughout the ages so I barracked and then cranked out bowmen from my second city. This lead to early GA and eventually I wiped out all the Chinese and reduced the French to one insignificant city at the very NW corner by the ocean and some mountains. I kept the French around since I knew they had made it off my island and thought I could use them to find other civs.

I used the Great Library and aggressive tech trading to keep money available at all times for tech and luxury purchases.

The rest was surpisingly easy since water prevented other mass invasions. The Greeks gave me headaches up to the late medieval ages since they had way more land on the large island and kept landing swordsmen and hoplites. Improving my hilly terrain with mines allowed me to break the early wonder cascade and once I was able to stay 1-2 tech leads ahead of the AI in the mid-middle ages I only lost Great Wall and Sun Tzu's (neither of which I really tried for).

I think I really had the game won after Shakespeare's theatre in Babylon and just warred a bit for amusement while running down the clock and keeping the Greeks in check. One problem with the builder strategy and Civ3 in general is that GL only appears in if you war. I wish there were a way to produce cultural GLs. As it is, Civ3 only truly rewards war mongering.

20K cultural victory in Babylon in 1952 during early modern age. Other civs had not quite made it to combustion. Overall culture was at 77K and appeared to be double that of the next closest civ.

Will try again on Monarch and Continents some time.

[Aeson]

The AI tends to not go for 'extreme' culture, so getting double the culture isn't that difficult. Two good ways to do it.

One is to go rampaging early, don't worry about cultural improvements until about 500BC. Start with size 12 type cities, but don't build in regular patterns, otherwise there isn't room inbetween for later cities. Get Libraries and Temples built in corrupt cities by pop rushing. Try to aim for somewhere around the territory of 2-3 of the AI's by the end of the BC's, with all your Libraries coming online about that point. Then every city that has a Library/Temple and is corrupt builds army/Settlers, and the core are the ones building Cathedrals, Universities, and Wonders. Use the Settlers to backfill, starting at the edges, and rush Libraries/Temples in each new city. Build as many cities this way as you can.

On a Large landmass that works best, and with Religious and/or Scientific a ~1200AD Cultural victory is possible. By that point the AI, even on Deity, won't be anywhere near 50k. The tough part about Deity is the conquest.

The other way is to go with big early cities and fast research up to Universities/Cathedrals. Try at least for a FP core in expansion. Then once the big cities are up and running by about 250AD, use the cash flowing in from them to rush cultural improvements in new cities. The improvements in your big cities double earlier, and you can rush things more efficiently later on. It's best for small landmass type of play though, normally 100k hits ~14-1600AD unless it's a difficult map to expand on (below about Small/70% water amount of land).

On very small landmass games, you probably have to get close to the Domination limit very early to get 100k by the time you could get 20k (usually 1700AD).